As computer systems are assembled, an operating system and applications are typically installed on the disk drive in each computer system. The process is often repeated, particularly by large organizations deploying multiple computer systems, to install additional applications or to customize the software installed on the computer systems. Disk duplication systems may be used to rapidly configure one or more disk drives by duplicating the configuration from one source disk drive to one or more target disk drives. An image of a model disk or source disk drive is created, representing the desired state of the duplicated disk drives with the software installed. The disk image is then copied to additional disk drives, either before or after the disk drives are installed in computer systems.
Disk images may be distributed over networks for installation on disk drives. One solution to network distribution of disk images is to use a multicast, enabling the distribution of a disk image to multiple target disk drives on a network simultaneously, rather than transferring the disk image to one disk drive at a time over the network. For example, the Norton Ghost® backup software available from the Symantec Corporation of Cupertino, Calif. and the Clonezilla open source disk cloning software both enable the creation of a disk image and its transmission by multicast to multiple target computer systems over a network. While network distribution of disk images increases the number of disk drives that can be configured simultaneously, it does add some complexity in setting up the network, connecting the target disk drives and initiating the transfer of a disk image to the disk drives. A typical multicast transmission may involve configuring the multicast server with the disk image to distribute and with the internet protocol (IP) address for the multicast group. A typical multicast transmission may also involve configuring the client computers or targets with the IP address so that they join the multicast group and collect the multicast data packets rather than filtering them out and ignoring them when the multicast transmission is initiated on the multicast server.